How to Create Evergreen Content for E-commerce Websites

by Helen Stark ·
Published October 23, 2017
· Updated November 9, 2017

No wonder that content marketing is one of the most discussed topics today. Being still the king of the most marketing activities, content can’t be treated as something you can pile up in a heap on your website and wait until something good happens to it. If you wish to get results from your content, you should work on it to make people like and share it.

In our fast-changing world, evergreen content is that something any website needs to have. This type of SEO content stays “fresh” and relevant to most of the users and continues bringing you traffic through the years. E.g. this article on Shape.com was published in 2013 and still going strong!

Evergreen content is essential for E-commerce websites that need a good amount of steady traffic to stay on top and keep their customers closer. Products may be sold or replaced with some new packages, but the posts about the benefits of your goods or helpful articles related to the use of products you sell will stay relevant for months or even years.

Evergreen Content: What It Is and What It Is NOT

Evergreen content got its title from pine trees that never lose their foliage in Autumn and stay green throughout the year. So, it should come at no surprise that content that loses its “freshness” and attracts readers only during some periods of time cannot be treated as evergreen. What evergreen content is not:

News and event reports;

Surveys, researches and other statistic data that changes over time;

Trend-specific or fad-based articles;

Seasonal or holiday-specific posts;

As you can see, everything that is based on short-time trends and topics, can’t be evergreen content. Thus, the above-mentioned content will bring you only a short-time amount of traffic.

Of course, some of these pieces can be updated to bring you traffic from time to time. Like holiday articles, since they are searched for every year. But these amounts are unstable and can’t be treated as high-quality sources of traffic.

Evergreen content usually doesn’t depend on time or other time-sensitive factors. So, it’s easier to gain a steady amount of traffic via organic searches and social shares with this kind of content.

Where to Start with Evergreen Content

Basics of evergreen content for E-commerce website are no different from those for any other business niche. In most cases one should take up three main steps:

Researching target audience and find out their major needs;

Making sure that the search intent has a good search demand;

Sticking to the “basic” knowledge that hardly ever change over time;

Keeping the content up-to-date.

1.Researching target audience’s needs

You wish to get a decent amount of traffic to your articles. And what is more important, you may wish to convert that traffic into customers. That’s why you don’t need a raw traffic from anywhere with people who are not your target audience.

Thus you should learn your existing and potential customers well and find out what their main interests within your niche. You have to learn their main “search intent” and build your content strategy around it. Here are some ideas of where to get you started:

Explore your audience: who are your customers and what bothers them the most;

Participate in your niche communities on social networks to learn that latest issues that users would like to solve;

Regularly talk with your existing customers on social media, forums and in support chats to getting to know their needs better.

With all this info about your customers, you can go brainstorming about what would they wish to know about your products, their use, and peculiarities.

2. Explore search demand and get your keywords

After you realized what are the main topics your users are concerned, you should do some research for the keywords they are usually typing into the search field.

There are many guides about keywords research you can stick to find out what are the best keywords for your content. In short, you have to start with the broad topic that your readers are interested in and then narrow it down to more specific searches they may type into Google.You can use any tool you like: from Google Trends and Google Keywords Planner to your favorite SEO tools. Even your own Google Search Console can provide you with some insights about your existing posts. Or you can drop your keyword ideas into one of the keywords exploring tools to find more untapped ideas for your posts.

Always select keywords that have the strongest characteristics over time, e.g.:

Search volume – This characteristic shows the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword. Google Keyword Planner now started grouping monthly volumes, so it’s good to have some alternatives at hand to get the exact numbers. Thus, you can use KWFinder, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush or any other advanced tool that provide detailed keyword data.

Keyword difficulty – One of the essential characteristics of a keyword that Ahrefs toolset suggests. Keyword difficulty index usually shows how hard it will be to rank in Top10 for this particular keyword. It also suggests the number of backlinks a user should get to rank for the chosen keyword.

Estimated traffic – Most advanced keyword tools will also show you the approximate numbers of the traffic you may get when ranking in the Top10 for the chosen keyword.

Number of Clicks – There’s no secret that even the Top 10 search results may get a low number of clicks. These are usually informational keywords (e.g. John Lennon birthday) that show the searched info right on the search results page. Thus, you may need the keywords with a high Number of Clicks index.

One of the general rules for most businesses and E-commerce websites is – opt for long-tail keywords. They have much more potential than you might think and can bring you tons of traffic and clicks.

3. Evergreen topics for E-commerce websites

One of the basic rules for creating evergreen content is keeping it simple. Don’t waste your time writing about some specific product characteristics that will not catch user’s attention. Don’t chase the hype of the latest news or trends that pop up from time to time. They usually get high attention for a short period of time and then fall into oblivion.

Think of something that will always be in the spotlight instead. People will always ask simple questions about popular products or services. So you have to offer them deeply researched and concrete answers to those questions.

Another rule here is being specific. Broad topics are already explored and too many articles for them are already written and take the highest steps in SERPs. Instead, you should think of more specific requests and try to fill the potential holes that usually get low attention within such broadly-related articles.

Thus, if you have a sports gear website, you may come with the idea of creating a guide to choose the perfect running shoes. Then, it can inspire you to create the guides on how to take care of the running shoes or tips for lacing up running shoes properly etc.

Types of Evergreen Content for E-commerce websites:

How-tos – Useful and universal guides like the examples above, will always get user’s attention and drive traffic to your website.

XX tips for the products – People will always have questions on how to use specific products. Posts with tips and hacks will always get a decent amount of traffic. You can also include user-generated content into your content strategy and create such kind of posts based on user’s own tips.

User stories and case studies – E-commerce and service websites can use success stories from their users to show the effect of their products or services use.

You can also create articles that answer the most popular questions from users, create videos and infographics that allow exploring your product or services to the best.

4. Keeping Content Up-to-Date

Having evergreen articles on your website doesn’t mean you can now rest on oars. There are a couple of tactics you can use to keep your content more up-to-date and make it sure around and get traffic during the long period of time.

Rewrite small sections of the article –. Even evergreen articles need some revision from time to time. There can be some new info or vice versa, some tips may not seem relevant anymore. Change some passages, rewrite title to make it more compelling and relevant, add more relevant data, or remove outdated parts.

Update your Metadata – You can try updating some keywords you find relevant for the post, rewrite Meta-description and SEO-title to make them more relevant and compelling.

Change the publishing date – Thus, after we changed the publishing date for our older post at the Ahrefs blog with SEO tips, we got it jump up to the 2nd position in SERP.

Promote the updated article – Stick to your usual article promotion process: send email to your subscribers, share the article on social media and forums and do other activity you usually perform for promotion.

All you have to do after all these facelifts is to keep an eye on the article rankings and traffic you get to it.

Keep Up the Routine

These activities as well as targeting to create more evergreen articles should become a part of your weekly content marketing routine. Set up your priority to the articles that already perform well in search results and try making them 10x better. Create new content with the similar tactics and topic hacks in mind and you’ll be getting a decent amount of traffic constantly and with less effort.

Well, do you think this very article can become an example of such an evergreen content? Let’s check it up. Share it with your friends and ask for their opinion.

How to Create Evergreen Content for E-commerce Stores

Evergreen content is essential for E-commerce websites that need a good amount of steady traffic to stay on top and keep their customers closer.

Helen is a marketing manager at Ahrefs.com. She explores new things every day to impress her readers with catchy stories. Apart from all that marketing stuff, Helen loves listening to rock music, reading and traveling. A lot! Follow Helen on @helenstark127